One Swimming Pool Party Cake Coming Up!

Before you start reading, I've labelled this a tutorial, mainly because I love reading tutorials on other people's blogs and never put any on mine! I do miss out steps, so if you need more information about anything leave me a message!

Little Man is going to be 7 soon. My baby is disappearing all the time, and I can't believe where the time has gone. I should add that the baby is being replaced by one gorgeous cheeky monkey who I am beyond proud of. I'll stop there, there's nothing worse than a gushing mother!

Anyway, Little Man decided that he wanted a pool party this year, and since it was cheaper than anything else I could come up with, who was I to argue?! The only problem was he added that he wanted a pool cake and NOT from a shop. My hopes of a quick run to the supermarket returning triumphantly with a Ben 10 cake were dashed, and I had to get my thinking cap on.

He stipulated a chocolate cake, which isn't a problem, but I was stuck with the icing. The chocolate icing recipes I've used before (trust me, I've tried a few) are all too sweet. I love this stuff, I grew up eating it in my French great grandmother's kitchen:


So I searched the Internet for Nutella icing, and I found something similar to this:

Nutella Icing
3 to 4 tablespoons of Nutella
About 150ml double cream
A few drops of vanilla extract to taste

I put the Nutella, double cream and vanilla extract in a bowl and beat the mixture with an electric beater. That's it! I may have added a bit more cream to loosen the mixture a bit though. I did think I could have added a bit of icing sugar, but I was planning to put a layer of fondant icing on top of it, so I didn't. The cake then looked like this:



Right, now came the next problem, how was I going to turn a chocolate cake into a sparkling swimming pool? I went to Flickr and looked at all the pool cakes there, truely inspiring!

I visited a cake shop and bought:
White icing
Paprika colouring
Edible Lustre in a sparkling blue
Piping gel
Coloured fondant icing
A pack of writing icing in assorted colours.

I kneaded a tiny bit of paprika colouring with a lot of white icing, and got a pinky fleshy colour. Then I got to shaping and rolling bits of icing to make little people. I used to writing icing to pipe on the hair and Little Lady's swimming costume, and I used some green fondant to make the swimming trunks that have the legs sticking out of them. I ended up with these:


Then I rolled out more white fondant icing and laid it on the cake. I got a bit excited at this point, because I broke open the edible lustre, it's amazing stuff! It's powder, you brush it on with a paint brush and it colours the icing like paint! Then my cake looked like this:


You can probably see where I got over enthusiastic with my dusting, there was a bit of a blue haze around the edges of the pool. I decided to make the edges of the pool with more icing (it disguised my mess!). I rolled it out and scored it so it looked like it was covered in tiles.
After that I put lots of piping gel on the blue lustre which turned the icing into a proper watery pool - amazing!(Thanks should go to who ever it was on Flickr who came up with this!)
Finally I played with more icing, writing icing, half a small milky bar and some Smarties, and the finished product looked like this:


I think I've done my 20 Minutes today!
PS Since posting this entry, lots of very lovely people have left very nice comments about this post. Thank you to everyone! I'm so chuffed, it's made my day! I thought I'd post a few more pictures which show the 'water' a bit better than those in the original post (they were taken by Big Man, Little Man was too high by this point!):


Stephanie Lynn very kindly invited me to join this, and I promised I'd link to it, so:

A birthday cake for Little Miss

Little Miss was born on New Year's day four years ago. This year she wanted a princess cake, which is no mean feat for someone who isn't skilled at cake decoration (I'm not enough of a perfectionist!). I leafed through a few cake decorating books and pooled some ideas to do this:

I was in too much of a rush to make one of those gorgeous step by step tutorials (as usual!). But if you're interested, this is what I did:

1. I made a cake in a ring mould. It didn't come out as tall as I needed it ( I thought it would come up to Barbie's waist but it reached her knees!), but that didn't stop me.

2. Once the cake had cooled completely, I wrapped Barbie's legs in greaseproof paper and shove them into the hole in the middle of the ring cake. I stuffed more greaseproof in the hole to secure her. You could use foil or baking parchment instead, I just had greaseproof.

3. I folded another piece of greaseproof paper and then wrapped it round Barbie's waist and secured it with sellotape. It then looked like she had a greaseproof skirt for the ball, which wasn't quite glamorous enough for my 4 year old, so I kept going...

4. There's a fantastic haberdasher's in town, so I bought some pink sparkly netting folded it in two and wrapped in round Barbie's greaseproof skirt. At this point I thought of getting the needle and thread out but I only hade half an hour before the guests were to arrive, so out came the sellotape again. I taped the back of the skirt up and tied it to Barbie's waist with a bit of wired gold ribbon I had in my stash.

5. I found some ver regal looking candles and stuck them in some sweets that i put in front of the cake. That was it. Easy and quick and it drew some oohs and ahhs from all the little girls who saw it. Perfect!